The Cat With Seventeen Lives

A Guardian column about The Bear.

Cat Troublemaker

Best Photo Of The Month Of A Cat Getting Angry Whilst Reading A Book

For Black Cat Awareness Day: Some Pictures Of The Bear

The Bear, the most intellectual character featured in my books Under The Paw and Talk To The Tail, was originally the favourite cat of my ex's ex. Our relationship had its teething troubles, but we're still here, together. He is sixteen and a half now. I am sure that, in that time, he has used up far more than nine lives. He's moved house on umpteen occasions, lost a couple of bits of his ear, gone missing for over a month, got inexplicably stranded on the opposite side of a wide river, been punched into a wall by a tiny grey kitten, and, despite his gentlemanly advances, still can't seem to get his Last Of The Summer Wine romance off the ground with the aging ginger lady cat who lives nextdoor, Biscuit. He is a little wobbly around the haunches, but is in the largely terrific health, and by all appearances - despite being picked and sworn at by his gobby housemate Shipley every so often - happier than he's ever been.

I've known and lived with a lot of black cats over the years, but I don't think I've ever met one who summed up their magic and mystery as much as The Bear. Today is Black Cats Awareness Day - a celebration, instigated by Cats Protection, of black cats, who are all too often overlooked by prospective owners visiting rescue centres - so to mark it I thought I'd post a few of my favourite photos of my most spiritually noir of black cats....

Black Magic

Not long ago, I linked to The Random Cat Project, a site which seems to be from going to strength to strength at the moment, with random cat encounters from around the world flooding in. I had my own random cat encounter yesterday morning, meeting near my local train station the ineffably sweet black mogger pictured above, who immediately latched on to me and brought to mind a female (I originally typed "feline" there - perhaps a Freudian measure of the fact that I don't really think of Shipley as feline, more like halfway between canine and whatever the "ine" word is for crocodiles*) less obnoxious version of Shipley.

To be honest, I was having a very up and down kind of morning at the time: the sun was shining, and I'd just finished the most lively and good-natured of radio interviews, and been given a guided tour of an exciting new bookshop opening next week in Norwich, but I was also worrying about a very poorly close relative, pondering my still slightly bewildering singleness, and had just had a phone conversation with another close relative who'd been having the most testing of days. There's a split school of thought on the black cat crossing your path: in Britain and Japan, it's considered lucky, but in America and most of Europe, it's thought to be a bad sign. But I can't think how anyone, happening across She-Shipley, could have construed her presence in any negative way. Three minutes of nuggins (see the Under The Paw Cat Dictionary) was enough to make me feel instantly better about the world and a great example of the way cats can soothe our ills. Naturally, I felt a bit self-conscious, crouched down on such a public thoroughfare, and as She-Shipley meowed demandingly at me, I spotted, out the corner of my eye, a large goth teenager coming down the path to the station, dressed in all-black: long sulky fringe, arcane bits of metal hanging off his jeans, impractically warm trenchcoat.

I have to admit that there was a similarly teenage part of me, the part trained forever by my not rampantly violent, not massively small-minded and not at all incredibly homophobic North Nottinghamshire secondary school, that thought "Oooh shit, he's going to call me a puff and knee me in the ear as he walks past, isn't he?" but then I came to my senses, remembered I was 34, and very much my own boss, and that if I wanted to stop and stroke a random cat on the street, I was very much allowed to, and anyone who didn't like it could quite frankly cock off. The teenager glanced across at me as he passed, and down at She-Shipley, and as he did, we exchanged a glance, and I watched his default sulk crack into a wide, unguarded smile, with not a trace of mocking in it. If I experience a more pleasant moment of human interaction than that this month, I'll be very, very happy.

* I just looked it up, and the "ine" word for crocodiles is "crocine".**

** That was a lie.

Postman Pat: "It's All Grounded In Fact" Shocker

In Under The Paw, I wrote about the time that my postman drove off with an intrepid Shipley inside his van by mistake. At the time, I thought this was just another example of Shipley's general nosiness and attention-seeking, but it turns out that he is not alone. Charlie (pictured above) likes nothing better than helping Nick Lock, a Somerset postman, on his round. More amazingly, Nick is not even his owner. Could it be that Charlie and Shipley are special breed of black mongrel cat with a natural affinity for mail? And does this explain why my friend Alison always, bafflingly, insists on calling Shipley "Charles". It is possible. Although it is equally possible that Shipley, who likes nothing better than getting his teeth into a big fat mailer* in the morning, simply cannot help but get overexcited every time he sees that amount of paper and cardboard in one place.

*Jiffy bags not included.

A Bear and a Bear!

Mail Online brings us yet more news of animal antics from the Berlin Zoo - this time the beautiful friendship between a cat that looks like The Bear and... an actual bear.

MY BOOK, UNDER THE PAW: OUT NOW!

Well, it's actually officially published on Monday, but it's available now on amazon. Click HERE for more info.

Seen One Black Cat, Seen Them All...

This has been an unusually long winter, and I can tell my cats are feeling it even more than I am. Baffled by why, four weeks after they gamboled around me while I mowed the lawn in a t-shirt, they are now stymied from outdoor pursuits by snow, hail and Arctic winds, they've been taking their frustration out on each other indoors.

The biggest victim of this (mostly) harmless tomfoolery is usually Pablo. Ralph and Shipley have never been huge supporters of their feral step-brother's naive anecdotes and reductive life philosophy, but Shipley is currently making Pablo's existence unusually difficult, jumping out on him from behind a variety of chairs, plant pots and cardboard boxes. In an attempt to keep Shipley at bay, Pablo has even developed a new war cry: a primal terror squawk straight out of one of Suffolk's deepest rain forests. This noise actually has nothing to do with war at all on his part (he's a rubber, not a fighter) but at least alerts me to Shipley's advances and gives me chance to banish the more confident (i.e. spoilt and obnoxious) cat to the garden for a three and a half minutes, until I feel guilty and let him back in and start massaging his scruff and telling him that I love him really.

Pablo generally gets on peaceably with the his step-siblings - including Ralph, so long as Pablo doesn't nick his seat, or the pair of them don't round a corner and come suddenly face to face - but there has been another innocent victim in all the recent maelstrom and that is The Bear. I am sure The Bear has never voluntarily attacked anybody, yet Pablo has recently become unnaturally afraid of him. This morning Pablo even let out his war cry when he bounded up the stairs at the sound of me opening the food drawer and was confronted with The Bear casually cleaning himself. The Bear's response to this was to lift a paw in slow-motion and offer a kind of "Eh?" expression. Shipley and The Bear don't look all that alike, so the only conclusion I can draw is that, hounded by Shipley (who, come to think of it, is very houndlike in many ways), Pablo has now modified his Scary Things I Must Avoid list from

1. Dust Busters
2. Doors
3. Short-Haired, Muscular Black Cats With Yappy Voices Who Scratch The Carpet A Lot.

to

1. Dust Busters
2. Doors
3. Every Short-Haired Black Cat In The Universe.

Pablo has come a long way since spring, 2005, when we picked him up from the local rescue centre, but his development has been physical and emotional, rather than intellectual. One only has to look at the picture above (circa summer 2005) or the cover of the book in the post below to realise that he is no feline Phd candidate. But is Pablo really so stupid that he believes Shipley and The Bear are the same cat? And does this make him the feline equivalent of a racist? Or is the battle between gingers and their darker-furred contemporaries an ideological one that stretches further and wider and longer than the mere confines of my house? This would suggest so.

Still, you've got to feel for the black cats in their historical plight. How many gingers do you hear of getting dismissed with witchy stereotyping, or being written off and consigned to a life of fading hope at the back of the rescue centre holding pens? Orange may be a colour that makes Shipley see red, but it has never been the colour of feline hardship.

Shipley:


The Bear:


N.B. That is not a black cat behind Pablo in the picture at the top; it is a cushion.